‘I don’t think I’m that unglad—’
‘Exactly! Unglad. Only you can use a word like that! It says everything about you.’
‘Unglad is a good word. I’ve seen it in the old Norwegian saga Heimskringla, in point of fact. And the Storm translation is a hundred years old. But perhaps it’s time we changed the subject?’
‘If you’d said that two years ago I would have understood.’
‘OK. I can go on. After everything finished with Tonje I went to an island and lived there for two months. I had been there before, I just had to get on the phone and everything was arranged. A house, a small island, right out in the sea, three other people there. It was the end of the winter, so the whole island was frozen and stiff. I walked all over it thinking. And what I thought was that I would have to do everything I could to become a good person. Everything I did should be to that end. But not in the abject, evasive manner that had characterised my behaviour so far, you know, being overcome by shame at the smallest trifle. The indignity of it. No, in the new image I was drawing of myself there was also courage and backbone. Look people straight in the eye, say what I stood for. I had become more and more hunched, you see, I wanted to occupy less and less space, and on the island I began to straighten my back, quite literally. No joking. At the same time I read Hauge’s diaries. All 3,000 pages. It was an enormous consolation.’
‘He went through worse times, didn’t he?’
‘He certainly did. But that wasn’t the point. He fought without cease for the same, for the ideal of how he should be, as compared with the person he was. The determination to fight was extraordinarily strong in him. And that in a man who didn’t really do anything, didn’t really experience anything, just read, wrote and fought his inner struggle on a stupid little farm by a stupid little fjord in a stupid little country on the margin of the world.’
‘No wonder he was prone to going absolutely bananas.’
‘You get the impression it was also a relief. He gave in, and part of the velocity with which he was hurled off course was born of happiness. He escaped the iron grip on himself and relaxed, so it seemed.’
‘The question is whether it was God,’ Geir said. ‘The feeling of being seen, of being forced to your knees by something that can see you. We just have a different name for it. The superego or shame or whatever. That was why God was a stronger reality for some than others.’
‘So the urge to give yourself to baser feelings and wallow in pleasure and vice would be the devil?’
‘Exactly.’
‘That’s never attracted me. Apart from when I drink, that is. Then everything goes overboard. What I want to do is travel, see, read and write. To be free. Completely free. And I had a chance to be free on the island because the reality was that I had finished with Tonje. I could have travelled anywhere I wanted — Tokyo, Buenos Aires, Munich. But instead I headed out there, where there wasn’t a soul. I didn’t understand myself, I had no idea who I was, so what I resorted to, all these ideas about being a good person, was simply all I had. I didn’t watch TV, I didn’t read newspapers, and all I ate was crispbread and soup. When I indulged myself out there it was with fishcakes and cauliflower. And oranges. I started doing press-ups and sit-ups. Can you imagine? How desperate do you have to be to start doing press-ups to solve your problems?’
‘This is all about purity, nothing less. Through and through. Asceticism. Don’t be corrupted by TV or the newspapers, eat as little as possible. Did you drink coffee?’
‘Yes, I drank coffee. But it’s true what you said about purity. There is something almost fascist about it all.’
‘Hauge wrote that Hitler was a great man.’
‘He wasn’t so old then. But the worst of it is that I can understand: that need to rid yourself of all the banality and small-mindedness rotting inside you, all the trivia that can make you angry or unhappy, that can create a desire for something pure and great into which you can dissolve and disappear. It’s getting rid of all the shit, isn’t it? One people, one blood, one earth. Now precisely this has been discredited once and for all. But what lies behind it, I don’t have any problem understanding that. And as sensitive to social pressure, as governed by what others think of me as I am, God knows what I would have done if I’d lived through the 1940s.’
‘Ha ha ha! Relax. You don’t do what everyone else does now, so you probably wouldn’t have then.’